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The Egyptian Revolution's Toll On Mental Health

CAIRO -Abdallah Seleem doesn’t watch the news anymore. It’s disheartening, he says, to see how far Egypt has slid from its initial optimism after Hosni Mubarak stepped down last year. It causes him too much stress about the future.

“You’re too frustrated to talk about it,” says Seleem, 25, who is unemployed. “It’s like despair, it’s like you’ve lost faith in people. You’ve lost faith in the process.”

Seleem used to talk politics with friends, but now sees it as a waste of time and energy. He prefers to focus on moving and finding a job outside Egypt. “My goal is to leave here,” he says, “because it’s driving me insane.”

Continued exposure to violence, upsetting news, and worsening economic conditions have left many Egyptians feeling stressed, and mental health professionals say the psychological effects of the last 20 months have remained widely unaddressed.

Egyptians now feel less safe due to rising crime rates, as well as confused and anxious about the future because of the prevailing political instability and deteriorating economic situation in the country.

Witnessing violence — either firsthand or through news reports — has proven traumatic for many people, leaving them insecure, according to the student researchers at the American University in Cairo during a study carried out this spring in partnership with the Ministry of Health’s General Secretariat of Mental Health.

Mental health issues in Egypt have long been stigmatized, a challenge for practitioners who have observed an upward trend in anxiety, insecurity, and stress among patients and the general population since the revolution began last year.

The goal of the study was to determine whether a special government program specifically targeted at those feeling the psychological effects of the revolution was necessary, and if so, how it could best reach those who needed treatment the most.

The program, named Nawafez, Arabic for “windows,” endeavors to channel mental health resources toward Egyptians across the socioeconomic sphere.

“[We] are helping all people who ask for help and who are victims of violence either in a direct or indirect way, [and] we shall be addressing the more vulnerable groups,” said Basma Abdelaziz, who led the media and awareness office in the General Secretariat of Mental Health when students carried out the study this spring. “People in poor areas, people who have no access to psychological help, and also those do not know that they have a problem.”

Hotlines, radio shows

A lack of awareness about mental health issues and the symptoms associated with them has created a barrier to mental health services, said mental health professionals, who have found themselves coming up with creative ways to reel people in.

They have set up hotlines, and a radio show about violence aims to connect listeners in need with mental healthcare services.

Any changes must overcome the strong stigmatization of mental health issues in Egypt, particularly the perception of Abbasseya Hospital as a “loony bin” where only the most severely disturbed patients seek care, an image cultivated in the media.

“That’s unfortunate, because you would want people to think of these hospitals as a place of safety and healing,” says Mona Amer, an assistant professor of psychology at the American University in Cairo, who supervised the study with Abdelaziz.

Lack of faith in the Ministry of Health has further turned people off, Amer adds.

“These are intimate services, to ask for help for these types of personal problems,” she says, “particularly when we are coming out of a revolution where people felt little trust in the government.”

Mental health professionals generally employ an outpatient model, where patients are expected to come to them, according to Amer. Clinics, which take on a form similar to practices in the West, often cater to the upper class, she says.

People from lower income brackets must rely on state services at public hospitals or clinics, but, Amer explains, generally only come forward when their psychological problems have reached a severe state.

This confluence of factors hits members of the middle class the worst, she adds; they cannot afford private clinics but avoid public services due to the stigma attached to them.

Nongovernmental organizations that do work with lower- and middle-class populations typically do not focus on mental health, Amer says. “The mental-health experts don’t often go into the streets, and the people who do go into the streets don’t often have any mental health expertise.”

Religion and family support

With their hesitancy to use institutional services, Egyptians often turn to more traditional means.

Religion and family support have helped many people cope with increased stress and anxiety since the revolution, the AUC researchers found.

A woman in one of the researchers’ focus groups said a rise in crime in her neighborhood made it hard for her neighbors to sleep well and continue life as normal, whereas before the revolution, neighbors would leave their doors open, according to Tiya Abdel Malek, who helped lead the focus groups this spring.

Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents gave answers that suggested a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder could be appropriate.

In addition, researchers reported “no significant differences in trauma levels or coping styles between those who were active protesters and those who were not.”

Meanwhile, the Psychological Health Awareness Society in Egypt (PHASE), a nonprofit founded in 2006, recently rolled out a media campaign to raise awareness of the social and psychological phenomena of violence.

PHASE cofounder and psychiatrist Heba Habib says the revolution had given her organization a new urgency.

From the Maspero clashes to the battles on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, violence and news of it have led to an increase in sleeping disorders, depression and anxiety among the general population, Habib says.

The Egyptian Today is the countrys flagship independent newspaper. Founded in 2004, the daily is published in Arabic in print and online, and has a sister website in English called Egypt Independent.